Comic book review: Prometheus Fire and Stone #1- A very bad start to a very long event

Writer: Paul Tobin
Art: Juan Ferreyra
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 10th September 2014

This introductory instalment of a seventeen issue, crossover event has to be good. Actually, it has to be very good.  It has to hook the readers into the story immediately and make them want to get every single issue of the run. It has to make the reader salivate in anticipation of what is going to happen next. It’s a teaser, a sample of the product that is yet to come.  If this issue fails to excite the reader then the entire crossover event is immediately in jeopardy. Issue #1 of Prometheus gets off to a very wobbly start. It then proceeds to trip, lose it’s balance, step on a banana skin and do a double somersault before landing flat on its face, arse in the air and pants around it’s ankles.

Why does it fall so spectacularly? There are a number of reasons. First off it fails to follow the last story (as seen in the big budget movie ‘Prometheus’) from its most interesting point. The movie ended on an unsatisfying note because it failed to answer the big question. If aliens created man, who created the aliens? You didn’t get that answer in the movie, and unless I’m very much mistaken it looks you are not going to get that answer here either.

Perhaps that question will be answered later on in the event, but there are no hints that this is where it’s going to go, and as that is the most interesting selling point of this entire arc why not hint about it here in the first issue? All I get from this first issue is the impression that we are going to get some Alien versus Predator fight scenes. That might be enough for some, but I want a bit more than that in my comics.

The dialogue in this issue felt a bit off to me as well. Sorry, that’s being a bit too nice. The dialogue felt very off. The characters were in witty banter mode and it felt completely unnatural. They were talking like characters in a cheap and cheesy action movie rather than as real people engaging in believable conversations with each other. The individual characters were impossible to identify with, as they were two dimensional, and drawn from the laziest of action movie cliches. The feminist liberal, sexually attractive, independently spirited young female leader. The overcompensating male chauvinistic macho show-off. The scientist with a secret. These people exist in bad movies, not in real life.

The art felt rushed, like it was half-done, like it was not quite ready for publication. Some of the backgrounds were lacking in colour and detail, the faces looked like rough sketches and the colouring was dull and lifeless.

The issue ends with a good cliffhanger, with the protagonists in danger from something lurking in the background. That’s good, but there’s a big problem. The problem is that the stilted characterisations and dialogue meant that I found it impossible to empathise with any of the characters, and I couldn’t care less about what happens to any of them.

It’s a horrible start to an event series, and a jumping off point already for this reader/reviewer. I’ll keep on checking out the other reviews, just to see if this event tackles the big question that the movie avoided, but at the moment I can’t find any reason to justify me spending my money on this long seventeen issue event. I really do hope it gets better, but this is no way to hook readers onto an event story that is going to play out over the next five months. The event needed a good start, but it doesn’t get it here.

Rating: 3/10